Cast

I chose to read the "cast of Amontillado". The short story written by Edgar Allen Poe, is a dark story about revenge and ultimately death. The story deals with a man (Montressor) wanting to achieve revenge on his enemy (Fortunato). In the begining of the story Montressor stuggles with the intense need to get back at Fortunato for all of his wrong doings. "I must not only punish, but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong." Whatever Fortunato did to make Montressor so upset, he felt that death was the best outcome. Another example of internal conflict that Montressor had was at the end when he was about to put in the last stone to close up the wall and he realized he was near the end. "I had finished a portion of the last and the eleventh; there remained but a single stone to be fitted and plastered in. I struggled with its weight; I placed it partially in its destined position. But now there came from out the niche a low laugh that erected the hairs upon my head. It was succeeded by a sad voice, which I had difficulty in recognizing as that of the noble Fortunato." Even thouugh he had planned for so long to demise of Fortunato I don't think any person is fully ready to ackowledge their actions when it is about to be completed. Montrssor displays external conflict in this story most note worthy when he suceeds in getting Fortunato into the catacomb, and locks him up. Fortunato seems confussed but still in good spirirts from the alocohol, so he doesn't react as strongly initially as someone else might had they been sober. 

I read the essay "Poe's The Cask of Amontillado" by Roger Platizky. This essay talks about Poe's reasoning for perhaps writing this short story. The time in which Poe wrote this story it was a very real possibility for people to be buried alive. Medical expertise wasn't advacned enough to know all the time if a patient was absolutely dead. There where even tools manufactured to attach to corpses in the off chance of them being alive so they could hopefully be saved. "Poe's story coincides with a historical period in which attempts were made both to protect individuals from premature burial and society from judicial acts of public torture that were formerly sanctioned as rites of purification. According to Pieter Spierenburg in The Spectacle of Suffering, the number of public executions diminished considerably in the Western world beginning in the mid-eighteenth century as spectators, growing more empathetic to criminals - as a result of "mutual identification" - increasingly experienced the suffering of "fellow human beings" with painful anxiety (183). In this essay is presents a reason why maybe Montressor wanted to seek revenge. Because this form of punishment was used only for major crimes, although not said in the story the author suggests that he must have done something quite terrible. This essay opened my mind up to why Poe used the kind of murder tool he did in the story and how in the time of it being written it fit with the historical norm.